Is the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy threatened in Italy, where access to it is hindered even in hospitals? “Special Envoy” visited a town in Umbria where “conscientious objectors” represent 75% of gynecologists.
Could the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy one day be limited or even abolished in Italy? The repeal of Roe v. Wade, who guaranteed it to the Americans, gave wings to the transalpine pro-life movements. With the far right in power, concerns seem legitimate. Forty-five years after the legalization of abortion, access to this right is today hampered even in hospitals.
That of Città di Castello, in Umbria, has eight gynecologists, only two of whom practice abortion. Without doctors Valeria Gavagni and Lorenzo Cecconi, no one would perform this medical procedure here.
When Lorenzo Cecconi was specializing in Perugia, capital of this region of central Italy, he explains, there were only two of around twenty doctors who did not call themselves “conscientious objectors”.. As in France, doctors have the right to refuse to perform abortion, but in Italy they represent the majority.
Words that “humiliate the patient and the profession”
In Città di Castello, the couple of gynecologists organize their schedule so that they can take care of all pregnancy terminations. Their first patient of the day drove two hours to get an abortion. She tells them about her difficulties in getting an appointment, and tells them the words of a doctor at the hospital in Foligno, a neighboring town: “We don’t do that thing. We’re all objectors. Here we have a conscience.” “But what does it mean, ‘I have a conscience’ ? indignant Lorenzo Cecconi. Does that mean she doesn’t have one? It’s terrible to hear such things.”
The patient admits being “stayed an hour in [s]a crying car”, “devastated” by this guilt-inducing sentence delivered by a caregiver“the worst thing [qu’elle aurait] could hear”. Such remarks “humiliate the patient and, at the same time, the profession”, reacts the gynecologist. And they are symptomatic of the difficulties that non-objecting physicians encounter in “innumerable quantity”he laments.
Excerpt from “IVG: the Italian Stations of the Cross”, a report to see in “Special Envoy” on March 9, 2023.